


Patience of a Saint

by Darkfromday



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Frosthawk - Freeform, I am typing what comes to mind, M/M, blame tumblr, old Clint Barton had a farm, this is not edited or planned, yay more ship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-29
Updated: 2014-10-29
Packaged: 2018-02-23 02:28:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2530637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Darkfromday/pseuds/Darkfromday
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How many years is a proper apology worth--or are even years not enough to wipe away the crimes of the past? Clint struggles with forgiveness, Loki struggles with mortality, and both struggle with loneliness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Patience of a Saint

When alien life made weird crop circles on his farmland, Clint Barton was too far away to notice, and too busy sprinkling feed for the chickens.

He rubbed idly at his ears, mumbling curses, and whistled almost higher than he could hear for his sheepdog to come enjoy the ass-crack of dawn with him. His hearing aids were malfunctioning again. It was too much of a drive to town to get them looked at again, and he didn't want the attention--but when the girl from Elders' Helping Hand had left (disgusted with his independent streak, no doubt), he'd known that flying solo was his only option from now on. Not hearing the tap of a stranger's boot would put a serious damper on his new life. For sure he hadn't outlived _everyone_ who wanted him dead.

Just, you know. Most of them.

He finished with the chickens, counting them as he gently booted them back into their coop. "Cap, Bruce, Thor, Stark--ah, Nat. That makes five. Now settle down, you boisterous bastards." They clucked but stayed mostly quiet--pretty unusual for them. _Usually at five AM they have more energy than me._

Lucy bounded from the front porch, past the farm, around the corner of the coop and forcefully nudged his knees, nearly making Clint stumble. He could still hear her bark all right, he noted, grinning and rubbing her head. Her jumpy level was about the same as ever, though (was he imagining it?) her eyes did seem to dart often toward the south fence where the cows liked to graze.

_It's probably fine, Barton. She still barks at the poor kid who has to pass the farm to deliver pizza. Maybe someone decided not to cook breakfast. ...Or maybe something--else--happened._

Clint's left hand started to itch, and he sighed, pressing it more firmly against his side. This was not the time to go stirring up trouble or getting involved in any. He was getting too old. Every wrinkle, shake, and blond hair that went silver seemed to rob him of a little more _fight_.

"Next stop, cow wrestling," he murmured to himself. Quite the step down from the Doombot, titan and god-wrestling of the old days. But if he didn't take better care of his hands, come winter he'd be unable to wrestle anything with them. (That thought scared him more than he liked to admit. He had once lived by the health of his hands. They were the only part of his body he could say he liked. Would he now die by their lack?)

Something brought him back to the present--Clint struggled to focus his dithering mind, and then rubbed again at his hearing aids. Lucy was barking up a thunderstorm.

"Luce, what is it? What's wrong?"

She was growling and alert, tensed like one of his old bows, aimed toward the fields where he and Natasha had once grown corn, now years gone, dry and flat. _There's NOTHING out there._ But Lucy was never wrong, and she'd once saved Nat from an escaped con who got on their property five years back and thought to hide out in the barn. Clint could doubt the dog at his own peril... or he could go and see what was trying to grow in his crop fields.

He glanced back toward his little house, the dull white of old eggs and the lost desire to clean, and his hand itched again. He started toward the house--but Lucy whined, and he remembered himself. There was no tech there anymore, not even the meanest of bows. He'd sold and buried every inch of Hawkeye when he chose Clinton Francis Barton, old-as-dirt husband and farmer. The best he'd be able to muster up would be a rake or a shovel, and any intruder but a murder of crows would laugh.

He might be old, but he wasn't funny yet.

So Clint went weaponless, whistling again to Lucy so she'd keep close to his heels. If he thought hard enough on the walk out there, he'd probably remember Nat teaching him how to strangle people with his thighs.

 

Loki was waiting in the steaming, smoky center of the hole he'd Bifrost-burned into Clint's land.

Predictably, forty-five years had not changed him one bit. Well--that may have been being too nice (a courtesy he never wanted to give this guy). He had more lines around his eyes, whether from laughter, anger, or some weird godly in-between phase. The inky hair he wore like a banner was much longer, though it still wouldn't pass for a cape. Everything else about him was _darker_ \--the jade he wore faded to hunter green, his armor dark, burnished gray. Even the scepter he held--not the Manhattan one, thank the God Clint wasn't sure about--was black, with silver symbols on it.

He was frowning, though. _That_ wasn't anything like the bastard Clint knew.

Lucy growled, planting her paws between them--but she was ten years old and well-trained, and she knew not to attack unless the once-archer gave the signal. He wasn't quite sure what was staying his hand now--except maybe the cough he could feel building in his throat.

"Barton." It was Loki who finally spoke, softly, without taking his green eyes from Clint's gray ones. His words were just as insidious as ever, but he seemed to embody a hesitant snake now, holding back the bite. "You look... much changed."

"That's cold," Clint heard himself say, in a cool and detached fashion. "You're clearly not seeing my good side."

It was a poor joke, but Loki didn't even attempt to laugh. Perhaps he was done serving civility and culture with his violence, or maybe he was just clued in on the obvious new disparity in their levels of strength. Clint couldn't help but notice that he couldn't hold a candle to Loki now. He flexed his fingers, getting the ache out of them.

"How many years has it been...?"

"Since your last visit due to a world-bending tantrum?" Clint tried to sneer, and that cough came up instead. Crippled him for a bit, but he got back on track eventually. "Eh, I don't keep track of you. Twenty years? Twenty-five? Probably more."

"Don't," Loki hissed, and then checked himself. A moment later he brought his own voice back up to an even, manageable volume. "Please don't."

"You look bothered. Any reason why you're back on _my_ planet, on _my_ land?"

For the first time Loki stepped just slightly out of his crop circle and into Clint's personal space--Clint stepped away, of course, but that didn't seem to deter the god one bit.

"We could say I was feeling sentimental," he said, "but you would know that was not true, and I am not in the habit of lying to myself. Anymore."

"So you want something." This was progress. Loki had never visited him before--but he had loved singling Hawkeye out during his many clashes with the Avengers, regaling him with an extra taunt, a dash of innuendo, or a hail of magical acid.

_The good ol' days._

"I do."

The god exhaled slowly, and an oddly-cold trail of air followed. Then he dropped the scepter between them, making Clint flinch imperceptibly and Lucy break her silence to bark.

"Shaddup, Luce--what is it you want, Little Lord Fuck-Up?"

"First, the end of your bites and pet names," Loki growled. "I did not come here with malice aforethought. I wished to speak with you, Barton, and more. There are things I have long waited for, and I will have them. But first--I want an answer to the question I asked you years past."

Clint's wrinkled face went uglier in a frown. He hadn't been anywhere near open before (hadn't been in years), but now he shut down still more hatches in his head and chest. "Answer's the same. Don't care that it's not the one you want."

"I _want_ to know how many are left, Clint."

"Don't call me that."

" _Barton_. How many of your comrades still breathe? Where is the spider I glimpsed a paltry few years back, hobbling about this farm more nimbly than you do now? Did she leave you for what life an old spy could scrounge--or has she become one with the land you so doggedly tend?"

"Enough!"

Clint stepped to him, feeling a rush of energy unlike any he'd felt in ages, and shoved him back, feeling overwarm and furious. He ought to have known Loki would aim low, would have been watching the rest of the Avengers die off slowly from the safety of the stars and near-immortality--but he'd always consoled himself with the idea that Thor was king, that Thor had Loki under control and that's why neither could come around as much anymore. (Gods knew keeping Loki either happy or sedated was a full-time job.) But he hadn't suffered the loss of his comrades in silence, without even Thor's bolstering shoulder to sniff on, to have Loki come piss on his property anyway by disparaging his wife.

"Barton--" Loki had stumbled back, probably more to spare Clint's hands and feelings than out of any real pain. That just pissed him off more. "I did not mean to offend--"

"Fuck yeah, you did. I don't need your bullshit. I'm old, I won't take as much. Don't talk about Natasha that way--about _any of them_ that way."

"...I am sorry."

Lucy growled some more--eventually Clint grew tired of it, and ordered her to calm down and lie some distance away from the Bifrost's markings, which she did reluctantly.

"Say what you came to say, Loki Laufeyson. Then get the hell off my land."

Instead of dignifying that with a response, Loki tossed him something, as though he knew before Clint caught it that he in fact would.

"I would know how many of the ones who challenged my right to rule still live. Where are the long-lived ones? Where are the vulnerable ones? Or, Barton, are you truly all that's left?"

Clint wanted to lie. He really did. He wished he could say that Steve was fine, not that it was any god's business, busy bouncing super grandchildren on one knee, and that Bruce was still arguing strong with his inner demon and changing the face of science. He wished that Tony Stark was still obnoxiously putting his name on buildings and supervising it from his souped-up Iron Wheelchair, and he wished Thor was still on Earth, visiting Jane at Elders' Helping Hand and cracking weak jokes about how soon he'd have to visit Valhalla to have a team reunion.

He wished most of all that he could still wake up and bump into Natasha when he rolled over. Maybe play with her hair, marvel at how the red just wouldn't go, and kick his alarm clock away in favor of curling up with her again.

But they had all died, by accident or by design, even those who should have reasonably outlived him. Barring Thor, who was stars and stars away, and the new young ones they'd trained half a lifetime ago, Clint was all the world had left.

He didn't say so, but Loki knew it, and he pressed the first advantage he'd been given in their dialogue.

"My condolences, Barton. Truly.

"...When I left Midgard, it was not forever, though for some of yours it became that way. And my eyes ne'er strayed far from your moves and deeds. --Yes, Barton, I watched you all. I was beaten by you, and your resilience in the face of my superiority fascinated me, once I had done with licking my wounds."

"Glad to see your ego hasn't been blunted one bit." Clint turned the round, smooth little thing over and over in his hand. Lucy tapped her tail in time with every one of his rotations, which even the green-clad god began to follow with his eyes.

"I--we on Asgard watched you slowly sicken, be attacked, die off, beaten by the only true long-term victor over your kind. I pleaded with Odin to spare your lives, to find honor in your continuous bravery and give you the ultimate reward for it. He refused--his heart had hardened after the death of his wife... my mother. Thor tried his luck, for your sake and for Jane Foster's, and got no better. For once his reputation and his perfection won him nothing over me... but in this I found I could not be pleased.

"Barton... Clint, please." Clint looked up sharply, stunned, as Loki bowed his head and knelt as though in supplication. "I asked you long ago to take your place at my side, to be my partner in this life and the next. It had been a pitifully small amount of time since our first ill-timed meeting, which I know contributed to your vehement denial of my proposal. But then... your rage was understandable. It was even desirable. I was proud of your strength, of your defiance of me, even as it pained me. I knew I could not change your mind, and so I tried to move on... to limit my focus to wresting the balance of power away from you and yours. Neither worked.

"I am not here as your once-conqueror. I am not here as invader, as antagonist. I am not even here as a god, exercising power over a mortal. I am here as a lost, broken thing seeking its completion. I seek the compatible half I once found in you, the half I know you keep buried beneath your resentment and rage. I watched Stark die, watched Banner's loss, railed against the Captain's, and wept with you when you found your longest partner cold at your side. I kept away to spare you the purity of your feelings--but no longer. I will not stand at Heimdall's side and watch you waste away too. I will _not_ let the Norns rob me of you, Clint Barton. Odin sleeps eternally, Thor has his arms open in welcome--my gift to you is choice, the chance to take the knowledge you have gained in old age and wipe it away, wipe away the hallmarks Time has left upon your body." There was a phantom feeling, as though the frost giant had just placed his hand tenderly on Clint's weathered cheek. 

"Join us in Asgard...? Join me, Clint, and Thor, and Lady Sif, and the Warriors Three, and see the new world we have built on the shoulders of the old gold. See how I have defied my fate and advanced the Realm Eternal!"

"No."

Loki deflated. The shadow of helpless rage flickered behind his eyes.

"This is no jest, Barton. I do not offer you poison. I am giving you LIFE!"

"Life with you, forever." Clint held up the apple, which shone defiantly to spite the rising sun. "Why would I want that?"

The growl that escaped the being kneeling in the dirt was such that even fearless Lucy shifted nervously. "Asgard is a wide realm--if you are truly set on despising me until time unravels, we need not ever see one another in all your immortal life. But we both know that is not the true state of your feelings."

"You don't have a _right_ to my feelings, damn you, and you never have--" Another fit of coughing took Clint, and this time Loki rose and pressed the old man to his chest, protests be damned, until the fit subsided. "I'm old, and I buried that sickness when I fell in love again. I wanted a healthy life. I wanted to live a long time, and die in peace, not in a firefight or an op. You can't come at the end of the story and decide that you want to play with one of your old toys again, whisk the princess away to another castle--that's not how it fucking _works_!"

"Damn your stories!" The god exploded; green tendrils of power hissed like smoke, climbed and slithered around his limbs with the ebb and flow of his fury. "I am not the author of a tale and nor are you. The Norns control your fate and mine, and I have yielded to them once. I let you mortals 'move on', marry, have your own sort of progeny and become legends. For ages now I have been defying their will and reshaping my destiny and Asgard's. I would not see one of the men I fought for most lost in pointless struggle with man's greatest foe! Unreliable hands and slow reflexes do not have to be your end, Clint. Come with me! Or stay, I care not, so long as you eat Idunn's gift and let your wrinkles subside, your heart mend and your ears be restored to what they were."

"I've always had hearing aids, Loki. You clearly haven't been watching me that closely."

For a few seconds Loki looked fascinated and insanely curious. But the pleading expression he'd just been wearing came back with a vengeance. "Think about it, at least? Please? I took no other lovers in our near half-century apart--for though we have never been that intensely intimate, I missed your touch and knew the value in waiting."

"Liar."

Clint got a chuckle for that, but he kept his face stony as he twirled the golden fruit--he knew Loki's nature as well as anyone, and felt no irritation about the infidelity or the untruth. He had not been faithful to Loki's fantasy of past togetherness either.

"Clint... I have always loved you for what you were, and are. Should you choose to live out the remainder of your mortal life here, on Midgard... I came to at least promise you more comfort. However, if you will--if you should--if you consume the apple, I can promise you so much more. Not simply the renewal of your skin and bones and muscle and mind. It will be a whole new life, full of adventures, vitality and everything you could possibly dream of. It would not be a good-bye to this place unless you wished it. I could bring you to your allies in Valhalla--they are there now, pleased with you, but missing you too. Either way--as man or as past legend--you could visit them every day if you so pleased. You are lonely, are you not...? You did not expect to be Earth's last mighty hero, yet here you are, final shining star. But it does not have to be that way."

The rooster from the next farm over crowed, quite late. Faintly Clint heard his two cows mooing plaintively in the barn.

"It is not forever. The apple prolongs life--but even Thor and myself will be gone eventually, as you will. It simply will not be in a storm of my making, if I can prevent it. This would not be a chasm between you and the lady spider--eventually you would cross--"

"I said, enough," Clint growled at last, and Loki quieted himself with a visible effort. There was clearly a lot more on his tongue, things he'd perhaps been waiting to say for forty-five years. He hadn't even mentioned his own desire for Clint yet...

The old archer lifted the apple up, ignoring the way the elder god's breath caught noisily in his throat, and sniffed it at skin level. Lucy got up and trotted over, putting her paws on his hip, and he chuckled and waved her off, not missing the smile (definitely smile) crinkles that formed around Loki's eyes as he watched.

"You came all this way to see what it was like to kiss an old man?"

The crown prince snorted. "I have lived at least sixteen of your lifetimes, Barton, and in that time I have done things better and worse than simply _kissing an old man_."

"Bet you never waited forty-five years in vain to get laid though."

"No, I--" Loki broke off, looking like he'd been kicked. "...so then, your answer is still in the negative?"

"I didn't say that." He could feel himself see-sawing, weighing the pros and cons, balanced on a point of uncertain return. Loki was still the Liesmith, but he never could lie when his emotions were involved. In that speech Clint had seen every last one of the god's tells, in no particular order. If nothing else, Loki _believed_ his words were true and wanted the best for his old soldier.

Well. The best, and a little extra.

So Clint let the silence stretch between them, and then he reached up to muss Loki's too-pristine hair while he stepped away and pocketed the fruit. "I want Lucy. She goes where I go. And I'm not going anywhere until this farm is tired out and done. Naturally. Nat and I raised it together--and I'm no parent, but I damn well know you don't outlive your kid."

"...Done."

"I'm staying to find the cows and chickens new homes--not the slaughterhouses. And I'm not going to be your consort--you're going to make me the new Earth ambassador, so I'm free to come and go when I please--not at your whim."

Carefully Loki reminded him, "There has not been a Midgardian ambassador since Stark passed, and the Lady Stark appointed no other."

"Well, she's dead now. Hopefully resting in peace. And I want the job, the perks--you won't rob me of my freedom."

"Done. Barton--Clint--since the end of the Chitauri overflow, I have never wanted to clip your wings. Before that I was too mad to know the value of a high-flying bird like you."

"And no more of your flowery bullshit prose," Clint spat. "I'm not some maiden you can _win_. I'm a business partner, worthy of the respect you've denied me now that I'm old as balls."

"...Very well."

Softly the former archer added, "And now I want you to go."

"But--"

"No. When I make my choice-- _if_ I make my choice, you'll know. You've been watching me, right? Don't deny it--I know you have been. Whether you take it or leave it, that's the deal. I'll think about it, keep the apple, tie up loose ends here. If I decide to pass naturally, I won't have to worry about anyone cleaning up my mess. If not--maybe I'll see you around."

Loki seethed inside, Clint knew, raged and wailed and pleaded and paced. He wanted the happy ending, the satisfaction, the dissolving of his worry and waiting once and for all. Even gods had a limit, and it was clear that the prince was at last approaching the end of his rope. But outwardly he kept his face as stoic as Hawkeye had tried to keep his own, and after a very pregnant pause he nodded and added another quiet "done".

Real civility. Clint had to hand it to him.

As he did, Loki stepped to him, bending briefly to pet the now-placated Lucy and whisper to her. When he unfolded smoothly to his full height once more, he placed a feather-light kiss on Clint's cheek, and gave him a hug so firm the old man's molecules felt the squeeze.

"Be well, Clint Barton. And one last thing--it has been a pain, these past few years, to see you without a bow. Should you join us... we could remedy that first."

Light gathered around Loki then--he stepped back, into the crop circle, and with another sun-rivaling flash was gone from Earth.

Lucy whined and tore off toward the barn, to hide under her hay or take refuge with the cows. But Clint stayed, and watched the rainbow trail retreat from their skies in pursuit of others. He looked up until his neck nearly popped from the strain, and then let himself hobble steadily toward the house, already making plans for how he would wrap up his life.

Idunn's apple burned bright and true in his pocket, pulsing at the rate of his heart.

**Author's Note:**

> If you got down here, hi. Thanks for trying out my addition to the Frosthawk fandom! (This damn thing was supposed to be like 1000 words what the hell--) This basically happened because I saw a post three hours ago about Clint being a farmer, so.... yeah. Whoever made that post, thank you.
> 
> And if you're looking for notes about 'deaf to your rhythm', I'm writing the last scene of chapter three. Promise. :)


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